Tlatelolco and Bolaño’s debt to Poniatowska

On October 2, 1968, just ten days before the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games in Mexico City, soldiers opened fire on a demonstration of some 10,000 students at the Plaza of the Three Cultures in Tlatelolco, in the heart of the city. At least forty-four people were killed (the actual number has never been determined) and hundreds wounded. Thousands were detained and over 1,200 arrested, some to be imprisoned for days and months without trial.

Then as now, the Plaza de las Tres Culturas contained a 16th Century church and pre-Conquest ruins, surrounded by urban housing projects and government ministries. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The massacre exposed the enormous rift between the government, ruled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) for forty years, and Mexico’s youth. The government, which was so anxious to portray Mexico under its leadership as an emerging industrial democracy, instead revealed to the world its own dark, corrupted soul.

Elena Poniatowska (Photo credit: Casa de América)

Journalist Elena Poniatowska understood the significance of the tragedy and quickly went to work collecting the testimony of people who were there. In her 1971 book, La Noche de Tlatelolco (in English retitled Massacre in Mexico), she weaves together hundreds of eye-witness accounts to create a tapestry of horror. (Government documents released in 2001 would corroborate much of what Poniatowska described: that army snipers on rooftops began shooting into the crowd on a pre-arranged signal. Worse, they showed complicity for the order to fire at the highest echelons of the government.)

The accounts of the massacre occupy the second part of her incredible book. The longer first section uses the same narrative technique to explore the origins of the student movement. Like a documentary filmmaker, Poniatowska interweaves individual narratives to create a larger, more complex and heart-rending collage. She records the distinctive voices and their amazing stories without editorializing. By letting the voices speak for themselves, she captures the movement’s optimism, idealism and naiveté, as well as the manipulations of some of its leaders and the consternation it created among the older generation.

This is oral history at its finest and most powerful, and I believe it had a direct influence on an aspiring young writer who would emerge as one of Latin America’s great modern novelists: Roberto Bolaño.

In The Savage Detectives, Bolaño uses the same techniques to produce a similar documentary effect. His young Mexican narrator of the novel’s first section, Juan García Madero, possesses all of the idealism and naiveté, even the postured ennui, of those young people from the 1968 student movement.

In the second section of the novel, like Poniatowska Bolaño creates a collage of interwoven narratives to tell the larger, sadder story of the dissolution of the “infra-realist” poetry movement and the disillusionment of its two leaders, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano. There is even a narrator in this section based on a legendary woman mentioned by Poniatowska who, during the student protests of ’68, remained on the university campus by hiding in a bathroom for weeks after the army evicted the students and shut it down. Bolaño takes that story and riffs on it in his own inimitable way, turning the woman into a poet whose voice adds more cumulative details about the demise of Lima and Belano.

The narrative arc of Poniatowska’s non-fiction and Bolaño’s fiction is the same. From ebullient, youthful optimism the reader travels across the emotional spectrum, while a compelling gravity draws each story to its inevitable outcome, culminating in violence, disbelief and dismay. Both books, one through meticulous reportage and the other through febrile imagination, brilliantly capture the history of a generation.

The disinterred

The past has a way of haunting us. We think we have moved on, but events from long ago keep echoing in our consciousness. Isn’t that what Faulkner so eloquently showed us?

This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the coup in Chile, and because I spent so much time researching the events of that fateful year for my novel, I keep observing significant dates.

Forty years ago on March 4, general elections, which the conservatives hoped would reverse the course of the country’s move toward Marxism, re-energized Salvador Allende’s agenda even though the economy was in a shambles. On June 29th, it will be forty years since the Tancazo, the failed putsch that signaled what was to come, with far greater violence, on September 11, 1973.

The past refuses to die, and even the dead are not exempt. Last year, after disinterring the remains of Salvador Allende, the Chilean court officially put to rest the rumor that he was murdered. Forensic analysis proved once and for all that he died from a self-inflicted gunshot while resisting the attack on the presidential palace led by his own generals. The junta claimed all along it was a suicide. Even if it was, does that fact wash the hands of the men who stormed the palace?

Salvador Allende and Pablo Neruda. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

And now they have disinterred the body of Pablo Neruda, the poet and Communist Party senator who nearly won the nomination of the Popular Unity coalition instead of Salvador Allende. The scientists hope to dispel similar claims that the junta had him murdered with a lethal injection while he lay in the hospital receiving treatment for cancer.

At Neruda’s grave on Isla Negra. (Photo credit: El Pais)

I suspect these tests will come to naught. And hopefully Chileans will be able to bury these rumors from their disturbing past once and for all, and the dead may rest in peace again, even if the past refuses to.

In closing, a fragment from “The Disinterred” by Pablo Neruda, translated by Donald D. Walsh (Residence on Earth, New Directions Publishing, 1972):

When the earth full of wet eyelids 

becomes ashes and harsh sifted air,

and the dry farms and the waters,

the wells, the metals,

at last give forth their worn-out dead,

I want an ear, an eye,

a heart wounded and tumbling,

the hollow of a dagger sunk some time ago

in a body some time ago exterminated and alone,

I want some hands, a science of fingernails,

a mouth of fright and poppies dying,

I want to see rise from the useless dust

a raucous tree of shaken veins,

I want from the bitterest earth,

among brimstone and turquoise and red waves

and whirlwinds of silent coal,

I want to see a flesh waken its bones

howling flames,

and a special smell run in search of something,

and a sight blinded by the earth

run after two dark eyes,

and an ear, suddenly, like a furious oyster,

rabid, boundless,

rise toward the thunder,

and a pure touch, lost among salts

come out suddenly, touching chests and lilies.

 

Is historical fiction intrinsically cheap?

Henry James wrote in a letter to Sarah Orne Jewett, “the ‘historic’ novel is, for me, condemned, even in cases of labor as delicate as yours, to a fatal cheapness…” (I am indebted to Samir Chopra’s excellent blog for this thought-provoking quote.) A modern writer, James continues, can include historical details but cannot invent or represent “the old consciousness, the soul, the horizon, the vision of individuals in whose minds half the things that make ours, that make the modern world were non-existent.” Jewett wanted to write about the New England Puritans, but to James’ point, how could she without being one?

Laurent Binet, the French author of HHhH, apparently agrees. Winner of the 2010 Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman, HHhH is a gripping, self-conscious historical novel about the daring attempt by the Czechoslovakian Resistance to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler’s right-hand man and mastermind of the Final Solution, in Prague in 1942. Through a careful orchestration of the story’s  facts, presented with the ironies that only a historical perspective can provide, he avoids the “old consciousness” entirely, except in supposition, and yet he creates a suspenseful and nuanced tale.

I was drawn to Binet’s book not only by its subject but also by his treatment of the “historic” problem. For, although I enjoy the history in historical fiction, I share James’ concern: the fictional aspect, meaning the experiential truth of it, is usually disappointing. The lack of the “old consciousness” was the problem I had with The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin, as I struggled to articulate here, and it is frequently the problem I have with books about Elizabethans or Victorians written by modern authors: they fail to capture the consciousness of the time, making the story and, consequentially, the history false.

Laurent Binet (Photo credit: Booktrust.org.uk)

Binet gets the problem. Born in 1972, he knows he would be faking any dialogue between Heydrich and Himmler or between the two brave resistance fighters who parachuted into Czechoslovakia to kill Heydrich. So, to get around the “consciousness” problem, he inserts himself as a first-person narrator into the novel, critiquing his own story-telling and advising the reader not to believe what he wrote: it is made up and a disservice to the important truth of the real story. This metafictional device is clever and coy at the same time, and toward the climax of the novel it delays without adding value, becoming somewhat annoying. Yet it highlights the dilemma fiction writers face with any historical drama; it also adds another, more postmodern dimension to the story (as John Fowles’ techniques did in The French Lieutenant’s Woman).

Binet forces the reader to ask not only how much of what he writes is true, but how much of the past is truly capturable. Is all history fiction? Is all fiction false? What is the point of history if our imagination and empathy are not involved? And what better way to tap our imagination and empathy than with fiction? Binet doesn’t really resolve James’ issue, but he does a fine job raising these ancillary questions.

The blank spaces on the map

Historical map of the world by Ortelius, 1570 A.D. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

WordPress is great at providing statistics. I can see how many visitors I’ve had today, last week, on any previous month, or even for all time. What I love most, though, is the world map, with its spectrum of color. Like some hungry Napoleon, I survey my geographic reach: 124 countries to date. Countries with the most viewers show up deep red; those with the next largest contingents appear bright orange, and those with only one or two viewers are pale peach. Places with none show up white.

On one hand, I marvel that some curious soul in Bhutan or Ethiopia or New Caledonia has bothered to glance at my blog. On the other, the map provides a telling glimpse of holes in the blogosphere.

Language, of course, is a key driver. If you don’t speak English, you aren’t going to read a blog in English. That a blog like mine is read in places where English is not the spoken language is a testament to the emergence of English as a lingua franca. (Or is it a sign of American imperialism and the globalization of culture?) Either way, I prefer to imagine that the person viewing my blog in Cambodia or Paraguay is a non-native speaker working to improve her English, like the school girls I once met in Vietnam who were so eager to trade email addresses, rather than some American expatriate or tourist killing time at an internet cafe.

Wealth is another obvious driver. If you live below the poverty level, you aren’t likely to surf the web whether you speak English or not. When I look at the blank spaces on my map—much of sub-Saharan Africa, Haiti and Honduras in the Western Hemisphere, and many of the “stans” (Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan) in Central Asia—language could be an inhibitor, but I suspect poverty is the real barrier.

The most glaring holes in my map occur where language, poverty and authoritarianism converge to create eerie Bermuda Triangles of whiteness. I’m referring to those countries where my blog clearly can’t be read: China, Cuba, Iran, and North Korea. At one point, I thought Myanmar and Syria belonged to this sad club of censorship, but then, to my astonishment, hints of color appeared there. Just one or two visitors from each, but that’s a beginning. I can only hope the door to those last four holdouts will someday open as well. Of course, by expressing myself freely here I have dimmed my chances; it’s just this kind of criticism that these paternalistic societies fear most and aim to prevent.

Stick out your tongue

I had never heard of Ma Jian until I read his story, “The Woman and the Blue Sky,” in the Paris Review in 2005. As soon as I finished it, I ordered the book it came from, Stick Out Your Tongue. But, for some reason, I didn’t get around to reading it until now.

Stick Out Your Tongue is a slim volume of five spare stories about Tibet. Originally published in Chinese in 1987, state censors  denounced the collection as “a vulgar, obscene book that defames the image of our Tibetan compatriots.” They accused Ma Jian of being sex obsessed and greedy for money. “No one must be allowed to read this book. All copies…must be confiscated and destroyed immediately.” That demand only increased the book’s popularity on the black market, but it finished Ma Jian’s career as a writer in China.

As he explains in the afterward, he went into self-imposed exile. First in Hong Kong, then Germany, and finally the United Kingdom. What was the point of remaining in China if he could never again publish what he wrote?

Ma Jian traveled throughout Tibet in 1985, and these stories come from that experience. Already Tibet was changing under China’s control, but these stories describe a dirt poor society of nomadic shepherds, villagers, tribesmen and monks in the high mountain plateaus and grasslands far beyond Lhasa. The people preserve a deep reverence for traditions and a Buddhist sense of fate. There is a mystical, magical  and often superstitious side to their logic and actions, but what emerges in every story is the brutality of life there and resignation toward death. Perhaps this is why the censors were troubled.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“The Woman and the Blue Sky,” for example, is a haunting story told in the first person. In a high mountain pass, a traveler stays the night with a Chinese soldier who lives alone guarding the military telephone line. The guard tells of his love for a Tibetan woman who has just died with her unborn child still inside her. The traveler gets to observe the sacred funeral rite for the young woman. With the calm detachment of a photographer, he describes how her two husbands, who are brothers, cut up the body to feed the scavenging birds until there is nothing left.

The powerful stories of Stick Out Your Tongue remind me of the best of Anton Chekhov and Juan Rulfo, who captured the harsh realities of Russian and Mexican peasants in historic moments of great societal change. Deceptively spare in style, these stories are complex and deeply moving. The translator, Flora Drew, has done an astounding job rendering them into beautiful English prose.

Which poisonous yellow book?

Reblogged from From book to book:

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The secret of Raoul, Dorian and Oscar

“'Zola,' said Mr Gorby thoughtfully, taking down a flimsy yellow book rather tattered. ‘I’ve heard of him; if his novels are as bad as his reputation I shouldn’t care to read them.” Fergus Hume, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), Chapter 6

"I prefer books ... in yellow covers." The blackmailer Mrs Cheveley in Oscar Wilde's…

Read more… 1,401 more words

As a follow up to my previous post on Oscar Wilde, here is a fascinating glimpse into Victorian phobias. --TG

To invert is to subvert

Oscar Wilde was the master of the epigram, the biting riposte.  Though best known for his plays and novels, Wilde’s essays demonstrate some of his sharpest zingers.

“The Decay of Lying” is a perfect example. In this short, Platonic-style dialogue between two upper-class aesthetes of the late nineteenth-century English garden variety (picture Daniel Day Lewis in “A Room with a View”), Wilde pitches his own critical theory of Aestheticism, or “Art for Art’s Sake.” The brilliance comes from his adept twists of logic, the way he inverts accepted ideas in order to subvert them. Even his main argument that lying, really good lying, is the essence of art is a wonderful inversion of the notion then in vogue that art reveals truth.

Here are a few quotes that made me smile:

On England: “Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our national stupidity.”

On politicians’ lies: “If a man is sufficiently unimaginative to produce evidence in support of a lie, he might just as well speak the truth.”

On fiction: “The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts in the guise of fiction.”

On a contemporary novelist (poor guy): “Mr. James Payn is an adept in the art of concealing what is not worth finding. He hunts down the obvious with the enthusiasm of a short-sighted detective. As one turns over the pages, the suspense of the author becomes almost unbearable.”

On the literary school of the day, Naturalism: “The difference between such a book as M. Zola’s L’Assommoir and Balzac’s Illusions Perdues is the difference between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality.”

At essence, Wilde argues that the imagination of the true liar trumps the bald truth: “For the aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure.” The sole purpose of art, he says, is the same. It’s an argument that has become somewhat dated, still it’s thought provoking, and it’s always entertaining to let the intrinsically subversive imagination of Wilde carry you along.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face…”

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Today, the world over, people are piping in the haggis in honor of Scottish poet Robert Burns, born on this day in 1759. How many poets are so well celebrated? Perhaps it’s because Burns was a poet of the people: vernacular, musical and often bawdy. He liked his whisky, he loved his women and he cherished his freedom. Here’s to you, Rabbie!

To a Haggis

Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face,

Great Chieftan o’ the Puddin-race!


Aboon them a’ ye tak your place,


                         Painch, tripe, or thairm:


Weel are ye wordy of a grace


                         As lang’s my arm

 

The groaning trencher there ye fill,


Your hurdies like a distant hill,


Your pin wad help to mend a mill


                          In time o’need


While thro’ your pores the dews distil


                         Like amber bead

 

His knife see Rustic-labour dight,


An’ cut you up wi’ ready slight,


Trenching your gushing entrails bright


                          Like onie ditch;


And then, O what a glorious sight,


                          Warm-reeking, rich!

 

Then, horn for horn they stretch an’ strive,


Deil tak the hindmost, on they drive,


Till a’ their weel-swall’d kytes belyve


                          Are bent like drums;


Then auld Guidman, maist like to rive


                          Bethankit hums

 

Is there that owre his French ragout,


Or olio that wad staw a sow,


Or fricassee wad mak her spew


                          Wi’ perfect sconner,


Looks down wi’ sneering, scornfu’ view


                          On sic a dinner?

 

Poor devil! see him owre his trash,


As feckless as a wither’d rash


His spindle-shank a guid whip-lash,


                           His nieve a nit;


Thro’ bluidy flood or field to dash,


                           O how unfit!

 

But mark the Rustic, haggis-fed,


The trembling earth resounds his tread,


Clap in his walie nieve a blade,


                           He’ll mak it whissle;


An’ legs, an’ arms an’ heads will sned,


                           Like taps o’ thrissle

 

Ye pow’rs wha mak mankind your care,


An’ dish them out their bill o’fare,


Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware


                           That jaups in luggies;


But, if ye wish her gratefu’ pray’r,


                           Gie her a Haggis!

 

                                          –Robert Burns, 1786

 

 

Caution! Do not enter! Readers will be shot!

I love this picture which a friend shared on Facebook. Though it could be mistaken for my office, it’s actually a picture taken during the London blitz. Two things about it strike me. First, what could the boy be reading? He is so intent and, strangely, happy. Second, how odd to have access to a bombed building like that. Can you imagine the yellow warning tape that would encircle it today?

Proustian promises

Marcel Proust in 1900 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This year I’ve done what I hope is not a foolish thing: I have joined a Goodreads group called “The Year of Reading Proust.” There are some 800 of us led by a well-organized and devoted Proustian who online goes by the wonderful sobriquet Proustitute. The group formed late last year and, once the best English and French editions were identified and a year-long schedule devised, we began with ancillary readings to enhance the understanding of In Search of Lost Time: lectures by John Ruskin on architecture and art, books about the paintings and music in Proust, biographies of Proust, other books by Proust.

But now we are reading the masterpiece itself. I’ve read Swann’s Way before, back in the day when the entire work was mistranslated into English as Remembrance of Things Past, a title Proust apparently disliked. Tomorrow we must be through the first section, which is some 64 pages describing the narrator’s childhood memory of going to bed.

There is a hypnotic, almost dreamlike specificity to Proust’s writing. Long, entwining sentences full of refined sensations and thoughts. Re-reading Swann’s Way, which culminates in Swann’s crushing realizations about obsession and love, teases me with my own notions of time and memory (a bright fall day in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, sitting in an armchair in the living room of my parents’ house, the musty scent from the yellowed paper of an old edition tickling my nose), notions that only reinforce the essence of Proust’s theme. Reading him again is like dipping a madeleine in tea.

But, seven volumes, over 4000 pages, a full year of devotion! It’s quite the New Year’s resolution. When will I eat, when will I blog, when will I write? Can I go a year, or whatever it takes to finish, so single-mindedly devoted? Is the journey worth it?

Doubts already creep in, and it’s only January. Proust’s last volume is titled Time Regained, but that only happens in fiction, right?